


found

by burlesquecomposer



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Drug Addiction, Drug Withdrawal, Ghosts, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 16:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18392180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burlesquecomposer/pseuds/burlesquecomposer
Summary: Klaus’s right hand is Dave’s favorite one to hold. As long as they embrace hello, Dave says, they’ll never have to say goodbye.But war is a bitch, and Dave is the one who gave him an excuse to charge into it head-on.





	found

**Author's Note:**

> klaus & dave's story hurt me, so i wanted to make it hurt even worse

New York is merciless and cold, but Vietnam is a flickering flame and Dave is the welcoming hearth. They dance in the bar under the glow of amber lights and music that doesn’t rattle his head. For once, Klaus can hear—Dave’s words filling his ears like cashmere, his heartbeat when Klaus places his cheek on Dave’s chest as they dance, slow, in their own private corners.

All his life, Klaus has been surrounded by death and felt like it, too. The ghosts that follow him with their pleas, the drugs that make him feel like one of the dead; he coasts to drown them out in a desperate attempt not to have a care in the world, floats on his back in the sea of an unforgiving universe that one day will swallow him whole, into the other side.

They press their palms together. Klaus’s fingers are longer, but Dave’s are thicker. Some days it seems as though Dave can hold all of Klaus in his hands. The sensation tastes like glory and goes down just as smooth, better than any pill or ash or drink he’s put in his body. Before Dave, Klaus never felt so ethereal, yet so powerful, so in control.

Klaus had some explaining to do when he first met Dave, but there’s not a lot to explain. He doesn’t remember when he got his “goodbye” tattoo, but after it healed, he figured he may as well get “hello” to match. He was high as a kite for both, so high that the scratch of the needle felt more like a ballpoint pen. Dave always found the story funny, always laughed when Klaus waved to him in greeting especially with the wrong hand because Klaus often forgets it’s there. “Hello, goodbye, good morning, good night,” Dave would tell him past lips bearing that gentle jock smile.

Klaus’s right hand is Dave’s favorite one to hold. As long as they embrace hello, Dave says, they’ll never have to say goodbye.

But war is a bitch, and Dave is the one who gave him an excuse to charge into it head-on.

 

***

 

They sit on Klaus’s cot, intimate, alone. Dave keeps watch facing the tent opening, ready to pull away when someone comes, because Klaus is terrible at it—so accustomed to his own world, his time, being relatively okay with something like this. They’re going into battle in a few hours, and they’re both trying not to think about it.

More than anything, Klaus wishes he could take Dave back with him, bring him out of this hell. They’d go on real dates. They’d find a small place together, get a dog. He’d teach Dave the ways of modern technology. No one would have to know Dave is a man out of time, a man barely thirty who lived through JFK’s presidency.

But Dave has a mother and father at home waiting for him. He only knows this time, has never once entertained the future as a permanent destination. Klaus hasn’t told him where he comes from and is thankful for the lack of an Internet that would tell Dave too much of who and what he is with a quick search of his name. Not even when Klaus has anxious, ghost-induced episodes of panic out here in a living, growing cemetery—Dave helps him through them without question.

“I get lost easily in new places,” Klaus says, curled toward Dave. He laughs a little, a smile curling his lips. “My brother, Ben, we both have no sense of direction. Every time we’d go on… trips… Ben would cling to me and get scared, and I’d have to keep us going until we found one of our other siblings.”

Dave is always fascinated when Klaus talks about his family. Dave, an only child who grew up with doting parents. Their lives are opposites. Sometimes Klaus is envious, wants a slice of Dave’s life for himself, but he knows what he really wants is to never have been born with this power. He wouldn’t have fallen the way he did. He’d be taken seriously, then.

Dave takes him seriously.

“I can see that,” Dave says. “Remember when you got lost in Tan Dinh—”

Klaus grins. “And I asked that lady for directions and she slapped me?”

“What did you actually say to her?”

“I have no idea!” Klaus says, raising his hands defensively. “My Vietnamese is terrible! I just needed to get back to the bar. Probably insulted her family and her ancestors _and_ her future descendants.”

Dave laughs, his face crinkling the way Klaus loves. His eyes dance in the lamplight. “Next time you get lost, just stay put. I’ll find you.”

“Oh yeah?” Klaus can’t tear his gaze from him. “You’ll have your work cut out for you.”

“Are you underestimating me right now?”

“Me? No!” Klaus says, sarcastic. “You have some secret superpower I don’t know about?”

“I wish,” Dave says. “Do you?”

Klaus snorts a laugh. Is now the time? No, it’s not. He doesn’t want to think about his powers. He wants things to stay as they are, like this—not a care in the world, only the two of them, none of the ghosts of dead soldiers that surround him at all hours when Dave’s not around.

“My only superpower is getting lost,” he says finally.

“Good,” Dave says. “My superpower is finding you. So we were made for each other, I think.”

Klaus smiles, ducks down his head to stare in his lap, even when Dave gives him a kiss on the temple. He slides away for a moment when a fellow soldier comes in, grabs something, and slips back out again. Dave is cautious as he returns to Klaus’s side.

“So what happens if I lose you?” Klaus says, then rephrases. “If you’re the one who’s lost?”

Dave shrugs and stares at the tent wall, thinking. They hold hands loosely, a pinky tangled with an index finger, two puzzle pieces slotting together while the rest of the picture lies scattered around them.

“Guess you’ll just have to get lost, too. And then we’ll both be lost together.” Dave squints, smiles, chuckles to himself. “Sorry, that doesn’t make much sense.”

“No, it does,” Klaus murmurs. “It makes perfect sense.”

Dave cups his cheek and kisses him. He’s not sure Dave knows just how such words, such affection, make him melt. In this moment, it’s only the two of them. No war, no soldiers, no ghosts. Klaus loses himself, and Dave is right there along with him.

***

 

_“MEDIC!!!”_

Klaus paws at the wound in Dave’s chest in a feeble attempt to staunch the bleeding, though he can feel the burn of the bullet in his heart, the tatters of his flesh blown apart with such ease, so quickly. Klaus turns Dave onto his back, kneels over him, having no care left over to think he might get shot too, exposing himself like this.

“No, no, Dave, stay with me,” he babbles, “stay with me, please, _MEDIC!!”_

Amid the hail of bullets and deafening blasts, all Klaus can hear are Dave’s coughing attempts to talk through the blood in his mouth. They make eye contact, but Klaus isn’t sure how much Dave can really see in the cloud of shock. He presses his forehead to Dave’s and feels his still-warm brow smudged with soil and sweat.

His cries for a medic reach no one. No one comes. Klaus holds Dave in his arms, gathers him close, flattens his hand against the searing hot wound. It’ll be okay. People have survived worse. People have been stabbed in impossible places and kept walking, shot in the head and survived just fine.

If Ben were here, he’d tell Klaus to stop lying to himself. But Klaus doesn’t have that clarity. Klaus has known what it’s like to be alone, is familiar with loneliness, but for the first time, he knows it intimately—how worse it is when he’s finally opened himself to someone only to have him ripped away so violently, leaving that same opening in his body as he attempts to repair the one in Dave’s chest.

“No, no, no, no,” he cries, over and over again, a litany, a prayer. He’s never prayed before. He prays now, bowing at the feet of a merciless universe. Tears roll down his filthy cheeks, a humid rain of his own making. His heart beats all over the place. He can’t breathe.

Dave’s hand covers his own. Not joining in the effort, but comforting. Reaching out. Weakly, he pulls Klaus’s hand off his body and clasps it, firm and gentle and vulnerable. Klaus squeezes it tight, but Dave turns his hand over to open and expose his left palm, making him face it.

** GOOD **

** BYE **

Klaus shakes his head. “No,” he sobs, “no.”

Dave only nods. He can’t speak, but Klaus tucks himself in to listen anyway, presses his lips to his cheek, his ear.

“I’ll find you,” Klaus says. He’s decided this just now. He doesn’t fully know how, but it’s a promise. “I’ll find you.”

Klaus senses the exact moment Dave passes—not by his last breath or the light leaving his eyes, but by a sudden and immediate awareness of fact. He’s not sure whether it’s part of his power or simply his closeness to Dave. But he knows. Kissing Dave’s cheek, he pulls off his dog tags and adds them to his own around his neck. A weight. A reminder. A bookmark.

Their story isn’t over.

He abandons the battlefield like a zombie, listless, weary. Normally, he gets lost on the way back to base, has to follow Dave, but not this time. He moves on autopilot. Tosses off his helmet, throws his gun to the bushes. Someone calls for him. He walks. Finds their barracks. Enters the tent. Pulls the briefcase out from under the bed.

There’s nothing left for him here.

Klaus flicks the locks open with bloody hands.

 

***

 

He’s been sober for a day and a half. As soon as he returned, he dumped his entire stash, which took an hour as he’d hidden so much of it around the academy. Even then, he’s not sure he got it all, and he’s certain that he’ll remember another hiding spot he’d missed if he’s desperate enough. He couldn’t remember the last time he held so much in his hands, an entire pile, and it took all his willpower and then some to go through with flushing it. He didn’t watch it swirl down—only closed his eyes and opened them to a clear bowl. Gone.

Diego ties him down, just in case. It barely works. The itching starts, the chills; he wants nothing more than a fix. Thoughts of Dave recede into the back of his mind, and it’s relief he needs, numbness, to forget. Anyone else should forget and move on, but when Klaus can see his demons, moving on isn’t an option. The ghosts of his past will never stop haunting him.

Helpless to gravity, he struggles and falls, dizzy when his head hits the floor and his body lies at an odd, uncomfortable angle in the chair. The ache in his temple radiates through his skull. Maybe he can simply lie here. Wait. Go through the withdrawal. Starve. Sink into the floor. Die.

He squints his eyes open, spotting movement. A pair of boots walk into his field of vision. His eyes travel up a pair of olive-green army fatigues and stop at a bloody wound in the chest. Farther up—a square jawline and that smile. That lovely, perfect smile under kind, slate-blue eyes that crinkle just how he adores them. Klaus can’t help the broad smile that grows across his own lips as he gasps and sighs, “Oh, my god, it _worked_.”

Dave approaches and kneels down. He makes an attempt to touch him, but his hand goes through Klaus’s body. “Sorry,” Dave says, “I can’t help you up.”

“We’ll work on it,” Klaus says. He doesn’t care. He could be up on the ceiling for all he cared—all that matters is Dave is here, he can see him, he can speak to him. “Dave. Dave, you’re here.”

He grins. “I told you I’d find you.”

“Okay, well actually, I found _you_ ,” Klaus starts.

“A technicality.” Dave has quietly playful fondness in his gaze. He drifts his hand over Klaus’s cheek. He’s intangible, but Klaus can feel a pulsing sensation there. Like a heartbeat. Klaus wants to cry. He might be already.

“Doesn’t matter,” Klaus whispers. “I can see you. You’re here.”

Dave nods, close to him. “I’ve always been here.”

Klaus freezes. Mixed feelings churn in his gut. Time travel is complex and immeasurable, but he’s seen _Back to the Future_ —he knows what this means. History has been rewritten. Or perhaps history is as it always was, and he’s only now seeing it.

“I waited for you,” Dave murmurs. “Dormant, like sleep. On and off. When the Umbrella Academy made you active, I saw glimpses of you when… when I could. When you were sober.”

“And then you saw…” Klaus swallows over the lump in his throat. “You saw me…”

Dave nods. “I wish I could’ve reached you sooner. I tried. But you didn’t know me yet. It wouldn’t have done any good until now.”

“Dave,” Klaus whispers, “Dave, I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”

Klaus sighs shakily. “I wish I’d had you then, when I was young…”

“We can’t go back,” Dave says. “I’m saying that to someone who once time-traveled back fifty years, but… we can’t go back.”

Klaus searches his eyes, his face. The one he loves so much, the one he’s so afraid of losing again, fading. “So after all that, you…?”

Dave ghost-touches him again. Klaus’s cheek hums with it. “I met you yesterday, and decades ago,” he says softly. “I watched you take that briefcase and disappear. At the time, I didn’t know what it meant. For twenty years, I slept. And then you appeared, just a boy, and I could hardly believe it. I was lost, and you were a bright light in the darkness. And then for another thirty years I loved you even more, and I waited. You’ve been you all along—the same old Klaus who changed my life forever.”

Klaus trembles with relief and joy, eyes wet as tears fall, and he struggles against the bonds Diego tied, wishing he at least had his hands, which are bound together at the wrist. “God, I wish I could move, wish I could _touch_ you, wish you could touch _me_ ,” he sobs. 

“When you can,” Dave says. “I’ll be here.”

Klaus does his very best to raise his bound hands. Getting Dave’s attention, he unfolds his right hand with a knowing smile.

** HELLO **

Dave grins and cradles Klaus’s head in his hands, and Klaus would swear to any god he believes in that he can feel those hands just as he did days ago, in 1968 in the A Shau Valley. His firm, calloused palms, warm as they ever were. Klaus beams wide, tears in his eyes, light as a feather, floating on air. He laughs, can still hardly believe this is real, and Dave laughs along with him.

Love is a different kind of high, he’s found. Or maybe it’s something that makes the world feel less heavy and oppressive. It invades the lungs, burns in the veins, takes up space in the body. Makes him feel as though he can conquer anything.

On his own, in a way, he’s already begun.

One day, Dave’s kiss will feel like electricity—like life—like home.

One day, they’ll get lost together.

**Author's Note:**

> five: it's rewind time
> 
> :)


End file.
